Native Son Meets the Invisible Man
As fairly brilliant as it is, Passing Strange (at the venerable Public Theater in New York) isn't for everyone—which doesn't necessarily mean that everyone shouldn't see it. Co-written by the multitasking rock musician known as Stew and his longtime associate Heidi Rodewald, this epic musical tells the semiautobiographical story of a black kid who leaves his single mother and middle-class Los Angeles home for the libertine (and libertarian) pleasures of Amsterdam and the avant-garde art and politics of Berlin. It resembles a smarter and riskier Spring Awakening, with much better music and a lot more fun (though anyone uncomfortable with the guiltless endorsement of sex/drugs/rock might want to give it a pass).
Developed at the Sundance Institute, Passing Strange begins with what Stew, the play's narrator, characterizes as "a Holy War on Sunday mornings," when the Buddhist-dabbling protagonist, known simply as Youth (Daniel Breaker), battles his mother over attending church. A marijuana-inspired, church-choir revelation that "music is the spaceship in which God travels" leads him to pick up the guitar and start writing the songs that soon become his reality. Amsterdam turns out to be too much of a good thing, and in Berlin he learns that even the strictest German sensibilities have a sentimental edge.
Stew packs a lot of everything into Passing Strange. The title is lifted from Othello's monolog about winning Desdemona: "When I did speak of some distressful stroke that my youth suffered. My story being done, she gave me for my pains a world of sighs. She swore, i' faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange; 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful." But it also refers to the notion of blacks passing in society; though in Youth's case it's about blacks passing as blacks. The music is a rich mixture of rock, rap, gospel, and soul; the ensemble was deemed last year's best by the Bay Area Critics Circle; and there's so much subtle humor that if you see it once, you'll probably want to see it again. And if that doesn't sway you, maybe this excellent review will.